Space missions require the highest upset rate immunity available to overcome Single Event Upsets (SEUs). At times, electronic systems can operate outside normal parameters thereby producing faulty data. In some circumstances, failure of these systems can be catastrophic. Although radiation hardened processors are available, they offer lower performance and higher cost than commercial off the shelf processors. In order to use non-hardened devices, a fault tolerant scheme is used in architectures that include one or more redundant systems. To identify the faulty system, voting mechanisms are used. The voting mechanisms process the simultaneous outputs of the redundant systems to determine the system producing the correct data. The voting mechanisms used in these architectures are implemented through software. However, software implementations of the voting mechanisms are very slow.
One assumption using voting mechanisms is that only one fault occurs at a time. This single fault assumption allows identification of the faulty output. In some applications three systems operate simultaneously, so that when one system fails, it can be easily identified by the other two. Essentially, the third system casts the tie-breaking vote. When only two systems are used, it is possible to identify an error, but, not which output is incorrect because a majority vote is required to determine the failed system.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for an improved architecture using off the shelf components that provide a faster solution to overcome the SEU problems in architectures.